Sunday, January 28, 2007

Faster than a speeding satellite.

I am planning to run the Vancouver marathon this year, so in preparation for that I've been slowly increasing my mileage over the last couple of months. I'm trying some new things in training for this one compared to how I prepared for my last one (which was Portland in 2003, so a while ago now). One thing I'm discovering is that my body is simply demanding more sleep. I mean I noticed this last time as well, but the last time I ramped my mileage up like this I was still in the just post-student phase of my life and didn't have a job as well, so getting enough sleep wasn't as much of a challenge. But this time I'm really feeling it -- I need a full hour more per night or so than I was getting by on a few months back.

One big change for me in training apart from the mileage and training plan itself is that since Christmas I've been running with the Garmin Forerunner 205 watch, uploading and analyzing my results at http://www.motionbased.com. It's the perfect intersection of athleticism and geekiness. The watch is of course only as good as the quality of the GPS satellites that it uses to track the course, and I've had one run so far where it lost signal and wasn't able to correct for it and that entry in my running log is way off in terms of mileage and time. But otherwise I've been really happy with this watch, and I've started using the site to track the running log that I used to keep in Excel. It's been interesting to track my actual times for runs against how fast I'm feeling. It's not always as I expect.

I think I will likely do the Mercer Island half in March for a benchmark race about midway between now and Vancouver. Any takers for either race, let me know (Mercer Island also has an 8K category, and Vancouver has a half as well as a marathon). There are a few of us on board for one or both at this point, so it should be a good time.